Carl Szantyr has spent two decades crossing between traditional finance and digital assets. As institutional money moves in earnest, he explains where the bar has been set — and why most managers won't clear it.
BLOCKSTONE CAPITAL · AT A GLANCE
2017 FCA - regulated AIFM platform established
2021 Blockstone Capital founded — multi-manager, multi-strategy digital-asset platform
2025 More than $50M in capital deployed across the platform
Q1
What's actually working when raising from LPs today?
Capital is concentrating into platforms that can demonstrate consistency across cycles — not isolated windows of performance. Institutional infrastructure, a clear manager-selection edge, and uncorrelated returns inside a disciplined framework: that's the pitch that lands.
The LP base has also shifted. A year ago we were mostly speaking with family offices and crypto-native allocators. Today it's multi-family offices, wealth platforms, and smaller pensions exploring their first dedicated digital-asset sleeve. Ticket sizes have grown — but so has the bar. Diligence cycles that used to run six to eight weeks now routinely run four to six months.
And LPs are acutely focused on avoiding single-manager risk. In digital assets, one weak manager, venue, or control framework can quickly become a portfolio-level event. That's why capital is moving toward multi-manager platforms with institutional-grade due diligence built in.
Q2
What's changed most versus the last cycle?
The shift is from access to selection. The 2021 cycle was about getting exposure to crypto at all. Today it's entirely about how you access it. LPs are no longer underwriting the asset class — they're underwriting the manager's ability to navigate it.
The questions have changed accordingly. In 2021, an allocator might have asked which tokens we held. In 2026, the first questions are about qualified custody, segregation of client assets, counterparty frameworks, real-time risk monitoring, and how we'd behave in a forced-liquidation scenario. Performance is almost the last thing discussed.
"Performance is almost the last thing discussed, not the first."
Q3
What do LPs care about most right now?
Risk-adjusted returns and capital preservation — in that order. LPs want downside control, transparency, and governance. In practice: monthly NAV with independent administration, third-party custody, position-level transparency, clearly documented liquidity terms, and a DDQ that runs well beyond the generic ILPA template. For our platform, the operational due diligence is roughly as long as the investment DDQ — which tells you where the industry has moved.
The October 2025 liquidation cascade — which wiped out a record volume of leveraged positions in a matter of hours — was a reminder that the real risk isn't market direction. It's how managers behave under stress.
Q4
Where is the multi-manager model heading over the next 12 to 24 months?
Continued consolidation. The opportunity set is broad — market-neutral, directional, venture-style token strategies, yield, basis — but very few LPs have the internal resources to diligence ten managers across five strategies. Multi-manager platforms will increasingly play the role that funds-of-funds played in hedge funds in the early 2000s: an institutional access layer with embedded risk oversight.
The differentiator over the next two years will be data. Platforms offering look-through, real-time risk aggregation, and scenario analysis across underlying managers will pull ahead. The ones still relying on monthly PDFs will not.
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